Saturday, November 5, 2011

Practical Tips on Writing

1.Don’t hold back on that fantasy site visit /
phone call / interview / query / meeting that you have always wanted to do,
lest it become too late to include the results in your book. Do it now! This
book is your golden ticket.

2.Don’t lose track of your notes and/or future
ideas for inclusion by writing things down in multiple notebooks or on
scattered pages of the same notebook; concentrate, aggregate, cohere, reread,
and compress. Keep it all in one place (with back-ups). Obsessive-compulsive
organizational habits are your bestfriend; telling insane and vaguely
embarrassing stories later on, about how you used eight different colored
markers, four highlighter types, and multiple versions of extra pages stapled
into a vast mega-notebook that you re-read every night before bed – and that
you also took digital photos of lest you lose the whole thing in a house fire –
will be a lot more fun than explaining how you forgot to include certain things
and your book sucked because you never got your shit together.

3.Quick, tossed off, last minute additions,
typed right before you submit the final manuscript, probably aren’t a good
idea, no matter how funny or emotionally powerful you might feel they are at
the time of impulsively writing them. Always allow time to come back and read
something from a distance.

4.And run all quirky one-liners that you hope to
include in your author’s bio (do you “always enjoy a good latté”?) past a close
friend; they don’t age well.

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About Me

An enthusiastic instructor and writer, I spend my time freelancing as both. I teach book writing as well as all aspects of graphic design. I love to teach and I very much enjoy writing and creating books.